A Hurricane, Turbocharged

President Trump at the White House on Tuesday spoke to reporters about the status of Hurricane Florence.CreditCreditPete Marovich for The New York Times

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On Sunday, Hurricane Florence was a relatively mild Category 1 storm. By Monday, it had grown to be a Category 4 storm. That kind of rapid escalation isn’t normal — or at least it didn’t used to be.

Thanks to climate change, however, the sudden intensification of hurricanes appears to have become more common.

“This process — hurricanes intensifying fast — is both extremely dangerous and poorly understood,” Chris Mooney of The Washington Post writes. “But new research says that as the climate continues to warm, storms will do it faster and more often.” Mooney’s piece quotes Kieran Bhatia, lead author of the new research, as saying, “The reason there are going to be more major hurricanes is not necessarily [because] there are going to be that many more storms … it’s really the fact that those storms are going to get there faster.”

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I think it’s important to talk about climate change during extreme weather events. Yes, it’s true that no individual storm can be blamed solely on climate change. But it’s also true that climate change has that name for a reason: It is changing the climate — and the weather. Hurricanes are becoming more powerful. Extreme rainstorms (as this chart shows) are becoming more common, as are droughts and heat waves.

Given that data and academic studies don’t seem to have persuaded the current United States government — and a significant chunk of the country’s voters — to take climate change seriously, maybe the weather eventually will.

Related: “President Donald Trump and his current set of minions, anonymous or on the record, are exceedingly disinterested in lifting a finger to do something about global warming,” writes the editorial board of The Baltimore Sun. As the Los Angeles Times’s Scott Martelle put it: “They just don’t care. They’d rather pursue policies that enrich the energy sector than play a role to, in effect, save Earth from ourselves.”

Following Florence: Readers have told me they appreciate it when I point out good coverage from other news organizations, and a big storm is a chance to do so. Among major media, The Washington Post has the best weather coverage, thanks to its Capital Weather Gang team. I'm reading it every day this week.

Storm responses: “I think Puerto Rico was incredibly successful,” President Trump said yesterday, talking about previous hurricane responses. “I actually think it was one of the best jobs that’s ever been done … Puerto Rico was an incredible unsung success.”

That is a lie. Almost 3,000 people died because of last year’s storms in Puerto Rico and the federal government’s inadequate response. It is a death toll very similar to the toll of Sept. 11, 2001, as many observers pointed out yesterday.

A census of social media. The Pew Research Center this week released a study of news consumers — people who, Pew explains, “say they at least occasionally get news on social media.” The results: The news audience on Facebook and Instagram is mostly female. On Reddit, it is overwhelmingly male. YouTube has the most racially diverse news audience, split almost equally between whites and nonwhites. You can read more, from Elisa Shearer and Katerina Eva Matsa of Pew, here.

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David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt•Facebook